Fred knelt in the dust and crumbled a dead seedling between his fingers. He wanted to breed a crop tough enough to beat the droughts. His father had chased that same dream and lost every harvest to dry summers. But Fred owned nothing to start with. His plants shriveled in a mild spring. To crossbreed a hardy grain, he needed a hardy parent first, and he had none. He brushed off his jeans and pulled his straw hat low. His red sweatshirt hung loose on his shoulders as he walked toward the one place that might help. The country feed store sat at the edge of town, its weathered boards gray with age. Traders passed through it from farms far past his own. If any drought-hardy stock existed, someone here might carry it. Inside, sacks slumped against the walls. Fred asked the keeper about seed that could survive dry ground. The old man shook his head. Nothing like that had come through in months. Fred's chest tightened. Without parent stock, his whole plan died at the door. He turned to leave. Then he saw it. Pinned to a post near the counter hung a single wheat sprig, dried to a warm gold. Its stalks curled tight. Its seed heads held firm. A handwritten card called it sun-baked wheat, grown on cracked earth where rain rarely fell. Fred lifted it down with care. "Where did this come from?" he asked. The keeper said a traveling farmer had left it as a sample weeks ago. He wanted something in trade. Fred had brought little money. But he had brought his father's old brass seed scale, the one tool he never sold. He set it on the counter. The keeper turned the scale over in his hands. He weighed it against the sprig. Then he nodded and handed the wheat across. Fred walked home holding the sprig against his chest like something breakable. He passed the small red barn, its white doors bright in the afternoon sun. Behind it he had cleared a patch of soil for this exact chance. Now he had parent stock. Now the crossbreeding could truly begin. He knelt at the patch and shook a few seeds from the dry heads into his palm. They rolled hard and small. He pressed them into the earth and covered them. Then he counted what he held. He counted eleven seeds. Eleven. That was all the drought-hardy wheat in the world he could reach. If these failed to sprout, he had nothing left to breed from, and no scale left to trade for more.